


Enough

by lovelyophelia



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: 00Q - Freeform, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 22:51:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyophelia/pseuds/lovelyophelia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q’s got a closet full of scraps and a cabinet full of pills and a horrible tendency to rub his hands till they’re sore, but other than that he’s fine, he’s fine, and there’s absolutely nothing Bond can do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough

**Author's Note:**

> I've been trying to get this fic done for over a month - here's to finally finishing it!
> 
> **Please note: the descriptions of obsessive-compulsive behaviour may be triggering to some. If you are in any doubt, please do not read this fic.**

The seconds drag while the old clock on the wall ticks away softly, tick-tock, tick-tock. Light flows in from the window, but it’s hazy, misty, foggy. Everything is grey and white. Flowers crash by the window; they splay their leaves, dropped and near-dead. He feels an intense disgust for them. He is in the bathtub, where water weighs down his slick-white skin. He gasps. Breathes. Begins again. There is cotton wool in his brain. His fingers are numb and cold.

The ceiling in front of him cascades, pours, a shimmering fountain of smoke. It renews itself, endlessly, into the void. Paradox. Unpossible. Et cetera.

He doesn’t hear her until she’s right in front of his face. Eyes wide open and repulsive, she screams at him soundlessly. He stares at her until he is brought back, gasping and spluttering into the screaming world. The world is suddenly far too loud, the room cramped and tiny. Walls loom menacingly. The clock ticks maddeningly. Too-long talons dig into his shoulders.

She is screaming his name, his mother, with the red frizzy hair and wide, puckered mouth. He can see the whites of her eyes.

They take him off the medication, in the end.

  


* * *

  


He comes home late at night because the house is colder than the street and far less inviting. He stumbles from door to hall to room to chair, where he sits, and pulls of his hat, and lets his hair fall in his eyes. The walls are closing in on him again; he can feel the smoke clinging, cloying. It flickers, in and out of frame. His room is a mess again. He’d gone through it this morning in a fit of pique, hurling books, CDs, clothes up and over his head, out of their established place. They’d gone sailing by and nothing had happened. The world hadn’t ended.

He swallows. Some pages are  creased, the cases at wrong angles. He swallows again. The clothes are tangled up and over and around the books, the shapes all wrong, soft in with hard and square in with long. It spins, sickening, before his eyes.

_Wrong, wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong_

He doesn’t know he’s going to move until he’s already scrabbling on his hands and knees. He forced himself to breathe, just breathe, as his hands tremble and his stomach clenches and  he quickly, apologetically, returns each item to its assigned place.

  


* * *

  


Numbers, patterns, shapes – he flits in and out of them, dives into their steady flow and out again, just in time to breathe. He is dedicated, utterly focused, and a manically fast but sloppy worker. He forces himself to work back, repeat his paces, catch his mistakes (lost bits of code, breaks in the programme, unclosed brackets, a grumbling stomach, tapping feet). They pop up like broken gashes in his head -  a bleeding, gaping _wrongness_ that he grapples with, confines, binds, salves. This is child’s play – he even derives a certain satisfaction from catching his inconsistencies.

There’s no-one better than him at what he does. He knows it. They all know it. So when he is next pinned down, screaming, in the arms of a boy much bigger and more brutal than him, he doesn’t cover his face in fear of bruises or split lips or bloody watering eyes.

He taunts them. Stupidly, impossibly, irrevocably, he taunts them. Because he’s such a clever boy, and it’s all he knows how to do.

 

* * *

  


He can’t stop his toes from tapping and his eyes from darting and his hands, oh, his hands feel like they’re on fire – but he clasps them, he binds them, he forces them down and mentally threatens to sit on them if he has to, because this is nothing like anything he’s been through and he’s never been so terrified in his life.

They stare at him impassively, these guard-dogs, these thick, muscled men with their white shirts and their crew cuts and their empty, dead eyes. He swallows and tries to ignore the loaded guns that they carry in a holster under their shoulder.

_This is bad, this is bad, this is very, very bad..._

‘Are you high?’

The question stuns him enough to look at the woman in front of him. Thirties. Sharp suit, sharper heels. Office worker. Pistol at her back.

What kind of office worker carries a pistol to work?

‘I said, are you high?’

‘No. No, of course not. Why would I be high? I’m not high. Hahaha.’ He claps a mouth over his laughter, high-pitched and hysterical, and shifts in his seat. His feet won’t stop tapping. First the right, then the left. One –two, one – two. He forces himself to stop listening, stop counting. He gives her his full and undivided attention. ‘Why are you kidnapping me?’

The woman smiles, her mouth a cruel gash in a perfect face. The goons at the door smile, too.

‘Kidnapping you? Why on earth would you think that?’

‘I believe that’s the definition for being violently seized while buying groceries.’

‘That depends on who’s doing the seizing. You’ve not been kidnapped,’ the woman smirks. ‘You’ve been detained.’

‘Detained?’ _Oh._ ‘Shit.’

‘Yes,’ says the woman, ‘Shit, indeed.’

Within minutes, she’s deconstructed his entire life. Laid it before him, what a pitiful, weak little thing it looks - the disaffected youth, the underprivileged childhood, the multiple therapists and threats and clumsy, back-door fumbles. The issues. He realises she knew all along, there is no hiding from her, her questions were just to deflect and pretend and ensnare. She does this not to frighten him, but to make him understand just who it was he was stupid enough to fuck with this time.

The chair slides back with a bitter scrape of metal, and suddenly he’s pacing, teeth chattering, tearing at the collar of his shirt with one hand and plucking at the cuffs of his sleeves with the other.

The woman sits there, coolly, and observes him. She waits until he’s regained a modicum of calm – then continues.

It all unravels. The coding, the hacking, the coding again – she’s not sure which came first, and neither is he. He was pulling apart systems barely before he’d learned to make them. The attack on the right-wing newspaper; the virus at BP HQ; the mysterious disappearance of thousands of dollars of undeclared funds from Swiss bank accounts.

And, of course, the political stuff. It seemed far more personal to him, than his partners – more of a game, than some kind of high-flown ideology. While his confederates went in with a battleaxe, he went in with a scalpel – a touch so light and delicate you were hardly sure it was there at all. Until your network was on its back, trying to breathe through the new, unexpected hole in its skull.

He was skirting around the parameters, she said - always testing, pushing, observing, calculating. Destructive. And brilliant.

‘Brilliant?’

‘Don’t get too cocky.’

‘Oh, God.’

He jarringly, suddenly, comes to a halt. His foot is still tapping, jangling, to a beat only he can imagine hearing, but he finds it soothing. He stares at the woman.

‘What?’

‘This isn’t an interrogation. This is a job offer.’

The woman with the hard eyes and the cruel mouth smiles. Then she offers him a seat.

 

* * *

  


He is sure they knew when they hired him. He spins round in office chairs and fiddles with the holes in his ratty old sweater and mumbles, and tries not to laugh. Sombre-faced women and grey-suited men keep bringing him files and papers, stacks of machinery and bits of code. It’s a never-ending farce, this, and he’s determined to make them bow out before he does.

 _This wasn’t what you promised me_ , he almost screams. But there’s nothing to go back to. The poisonous London air with its blue-black sky and icy, fost-ridden stars gleam pointedly and all too sharp. So he chokes back his words and flicks through the files they give him, hacks the systems they tell him to and finds the finer points of his encryption system. All the while he fidgets incessantly, drinks ten cups of tea, and rearranges the pens on his desk. Every night he disinfects his computer – both internally, and externally. Alone in his dump of a flat, he ignores the hunger cramping in his belly – he monitors his bosses’ computers waits patiently for them to slip up.

The chance comes when the MI6 headquarters are blown up. A stupid attack, a clumsy one – but sophisticated enough to come from within the very network the boy’s superiors were supposed to moderate.

He pulls two cuffs to threads before they call on him. So, they say. You’re a technical genius. You’ve been hacking our computers. That was very wrong of you.

I was bored, he says.

Would you like a promotion, they say.

_Finally._

He doesn’t much care what they know, what they think they know, about him. He’s there to get a job done. He’s there to keep himself stable and clean and occupied and busy.

Every day, he exults in the complexities of his new role – the building, the operating, the engineering, the overseeing. The hacking and coding and planning. The managing of surly agents. He is brilliant, and attentive, and just the right side of arrogant. He’s the perfect Quartermaster, or so people tell him. A new Q for a new age. Haven’t they done well.

Every night he rubs his hands raw with soap and blood.

 

* * *

  


The way he catches Bond looking at him is not intentional.

He’s not sure, later, whose intentions it was. They come together in a snarling, snapping, biting, mess of tongues and fists and teeth. There is nothing gentle about the way they fuck up against the wall - desperate and needy and one-hundred-per-cent aching for it. The boy who became Q is present, so extraordinarily, abominably present, that even as he’s crushed up and sweating against Bond’s powerhouse of muscle and scars and skin, he’s screaming at the wonder of it all.

For the first time in years, his mind isn’t a constant string of broken equations and half-parsed, screaming errors. He’s with Bond – powerfully, certainly – in the moment.

When he comes - even as his body shakes and clings and becomes appallingly helpless - his mind retreats into itself, becoming quiet and still and blissfully blank.

He’s outstretched and broken, clinging to Bond, staring into the void.

When they talk, later, it’s about anything and everything unimportant. Q knows he can’t keep it up – Bond’s far from stupid – but he refuses to think about that. For now, he takes what he can, which is everything. He drinks Bond in, savours every second they spend together. And if, sometimes, Bond looks at him with those clear eyes and asks him in a quiet voice if there’s anything he can do, Q bends lower over the computer he’s fixing, or the weapon he’s constructing, or the twelfth cup of tea he’s brewing, and he pretends he hasn’t heard him.

Because no, there’s nothing Bond can do.

Q’s got a closet full of scraps and a cabinet full of pills and a horrible tendency to rub his hands till they’re sore, but other than that he’s fine, he’s fine, and there’s absolutely nothing Bond can do.

 

* * *

  


‘No-one else could do what we do.’

Q lies in Bond’s bed, sheets tangled around his waist, limbs wrapped around the other man. It’s very late; possibly early; entirely the wrong time to be having this kind of conversation.

Things are getting better. There is light and life and love. There’s toast in the mornings and strong legs wrapped around him and tender kisses and long walks and teasing remarks. Shagging Bond has just enough of the thrill of the illicit to keep things exciting. You never knew when something – or someone – would come back in pieces; when the higher ups or lower downs or some pesky overconfident young graduate would say _something_ about the Quartermaster and his Agent. Just enough tension to keep you on your toes, then.

Q only has to turn around three times before he leaves the flat, these days.

He trails a fingertip up and along the long hard line of Bond’s stomach. ‘Lots of fingers can pull triggers, James. How many people can recite Pi backwards in binary code?’

‘Yes, Pi in binary code - that’ll be a great comfort in a crisis.’

‘You never know. Better than murdering everyone in sight, like you double-ohs seem to do...’

‘Arrogant pup,’ growls Bond. Abruptly he shifts so the whole weight of his body is pressing down and Q is suddenly pinioned beneath him, on his back. With mock rage, Bond starts biting his neck and shoulder.

Q giggles; he can’t help it.

‘Alright! Enough, enough....’

Bond’s bites turn into kisses, grow increasingly more serious and open-mouthed as he moves down.

  


* * *

  


He is blinking and the air is singing and he’s very sore and very afraid to look into those eyes, those terrible blue eyes, though God knows he’s missed them long enough.

He lies in a puddle of his own blood, too weak to vomit from the sensation, the horrible clinging sensation.

There is a great deal of thunder around; implicit, not explicit. Bond is a man who, when he is angry, gets quieter and colder ad infinitum.

It’s far too late to go through everything that’s happened, but there’s almost no need. Bond’s seen it all on the cameras. They bundle him up, stick him back together, send Q to a therapist, who is aghast that they employed someone with this kind of background to begin with. What was he supposed to do, with a trainwreck such as this?

M shrugs. _Schizophrenia and manic depression. Guidelines never said anything about obsessive-compulsive behaviour._

Bond’s face darkens.

Things get worse after that.

Q was never mentally strong, and there’s some talk of voluntary retirement. Bond snarls it down as best he can, but it’s hard to argue when he returns to the flat – _their_ flat now, apparently – and finds Q naked and pacing, skinny limbs flailing, explaining too quickly that the fabric on his skin is too raw and too wrong. He’s clean, he has to be clean.

But what can Bond do, except hold him?

Q’s mind is a very dark and terrified place, but he lets Bond hold him, and he lets Bond wash him, and he lets Bond wrap him in the covers and lie close and listen to his short, sharp, panicked breathing late on to the night.

Bond is terrified.

  


* * *

  


‘You know, I’d kill anyone who touched you.’

Q forces himself to smile. ‘I know. You did. I saw you.’

‘I’ll always come for you. Always.’

‘I know. You did. You came for me.’

Bond swallows.

‘Is there anything I can do?’

Q’s arms are tight and strong around Bond. He holds him close, breathes him deep. Tomorrow will come, with its fears and worries and problems. He will go back to work, and there will be moments he buckles under the pressure and lives that black hopeless terror and has to step out to his office and have Bond bar the door and make sure no one comes along while he paces and rocks and jerks and cries.

‘Just you being here. That’s enough.’


End file.
